Detective Max Mingus and his partner Joe Liston are investigating the discovery of a body at Miami’s Primate Park Zoo.
“Looks like he’s been dead two weeks,” Max said, undoing his shirtsleeves, folding them over the cuffs of his jacket and pushing them back up to his elbows, the way he always did whenever he was inspecting a cadaver. It was just in case he needed to stick his hand into a wound to retrieve an important fragment of evidence.
“Smells like three,” Joe said, turning away from the stench, which had broken through the barrier of Vicks on his upper lip and gotten up his nose and into his stomach. It was as intense as it was vile, like a whole dead cow left in a dumpster in high summer. He didn’t know how Max could stand to get in so close.
The body was that of a black man, naked, and in advanced stages of decomposition. It was swollen and misshapen, pumped up with a cocktail of malign gasses emanating from the liquefying insides; the skin was stretched as tight as it could go, in places semi-transparent like gauze, allowing glimpses of the body’s afterlife, the shadowy movements of parasitical worms and insects now colonising it.
The mouth was completely covered in a grotesque pout of busy fleshflies - told apart from common blowflies by their candy-striped black and white bodies. The eyes were long gone, as were their lids, no doubt eaten by insects. The sockets had become two teeming nests of writhing maggots, the colour and texture of rancid butter. They were being picked off one by one by an orderly procession of metallic green-bodied, hister beetles, which were travelling in single-file up from the corpse’s left ears, grabbing a maggot in their jaws, pulling them out of their communal homes and carrying them, wriggling fiercely, back into the right earholes, in parallel descending streams. Viewed from above it looked like the black man’s squirming eye sockets were crying big shiny green tears.
Max and Joe were the only ones near the body. The paramedics were tending to the security guard who’d discovered it and swallowed a mouthful of flies for his trouble. They were explaining what stomach-pumping involved. He was talking about needing coffee and something to keep him awake. Two uniforms were standing off to the left, blue uniforms; North Miami PD. One young, one old. Both stood away to one side, fingers hooked around their belts, smoking cigarettes, looking bored. The rest of the Park staff had all congregated in the public tunnel and were watching the scene through the wire. Neither forensics nor back-up had arrived.
Meanwhile, behind them, Max and Joe could hear the zoo’s inmates getting increasingly restless. Ever since they’d arrived they’d heard loud, fearsome roars coming from the trees. It sounded like a lion only angrier and edgier, with more to prove. Howler Monkeys - the veterinarian had explained with a smile, when she’d seen Max and Joe exchange worried looks – it was what they did in the morning to warn off any competition: nothing to worry about, they were harmless, all bark, no bite. Then they’d heard more sounds, coming from other kinds of monkey – screeches, hollering, barks, mewls, braying, howls, more roars, and something which sounded like high-speed cackling of a hen on steroids. Together the noises, uninhibited and completely abandoned, came together in a mad primal cacophony, not unlike the way a bar filled with drunks speaking in tongues would sound.
There was plenty of accompanying movement in the jungle too, the unmistakeable sound of disturbance and movement, crashings in the trees and bushes, branches snapping, things being knocked over and broken, all of it getting louder, clearer and closer.
Max looked over at the jungle – an impressive but completely incongruous legion of tropical trees, too tall and wide for the area of flatland they occupied and way too tall for Miami – and clearly saw monkeys, lots and lots of them, hopping from branch to branch and tree to tree, heading towards the high wire perimeter fence.
Max stood up and walked over to the corpse’s feet. The ends of the toes had turned completely black and sticky. He noticed puncture marks in the legs – teeth and claw marks, all of them leaking clear slimy fluid, some already squirming yellowy with maggot nests.
He followed the body back with his eyes, then returned to the area of grass beyond the feet. A stretch of grass behind the head and beyond, approximately the width of the dead man’s shoulders, was lying flat. The grass in front of the toes, leading to the main building was upright. The body had been dragged here.
Max got up and began to walk towards the jungle, looking down at the grass the whole time, as if following invisible mouse race. He traced the trail of flattened grass all the way back to the forty-foot-high wire fence. There was a sign on it, a stark two-metre-high and three wide red on white banner warning of electrocution. It was the same kind of fence they had in maximum security prisons, only theirs hummed with lethal current. This one was quiet. Which meant that it wasn’t working.
He reached the beginning of the trail. It ended at the gate. He tried it. The gate was open.
Then something on the grass to his right caught his eye. He turned around and found himself looking at a row of eight monkeys sitting on their haunches, looking right at him. They were beige, apart from their arms, shoulders and heads, which were light grey. Their faces were also grey, except for the area around their eyes and nose, which was a horizontal figure eight in white, like the Lone Ranger mask, while their eyes and mouths were surrounded in black borders. How long had they been there? Had they dragged the body over? He couldn’t exactly ask them.
Suddenly he heard heavy footfalls from behind the fence. Two large, ginger-haired monkeys with long flabby chins were leaning over a log, glaring at him through like two badass desperadoes in a saloon bar, waiting to be served. How long before they came through?
Max returned to the body. More people had arrived – two more uniforms, medics, the forensics team – photographer, fingerprinter, sample collector – and a guy who seemed to have come straight off a yacht, if his clothes were anything to go by: white duck pants, espadrilles, a blue blazer and a red cravat. He was talking to Joe.
Max beckoned his partner over.
“Our guy died in there,” he motioned to the jungle. “Musta stunk the place out so bad the monkeys dragged him out. Forensics’ll have to go in there.”
Extract 2
Extracts from the sacrificial ceremony of Jean Assad at the hands of Solomon Boukman and his Saturday Nights Barons Club…
A bright light was trained on him from behind, illuminating his immediate surroundings – the cold grey cement floor with reddish brown markings painted thickly on it on it: a cross to the left, a star to the right, a long vertical line dividing them. It was a giant vévé, a voodoo symbol used to in part to invoke gods and spirits in ceremonies . Usually a vévé was drawn in flour, sand or cornmeal, but this one had been painted in what looked like blood. Beyond that stood the Barons, facing him. His feet were in a metal fire bucket, filled with water. His hands were resting on his thighs, palms down.
He saw that he was completely naked and that his arms, legs and what he could see of his chest were completely hairless and oddly shiny. Then he noticed that there were no bindings of any kind on him. He was technically free to stand up.
He felt ashamed of his nakedness and wanted to cover up, but he couldn’t move his hands that short distance to cover his crotch. Then he tried to take his legs out of the bucket, but they stayed where they were, without even a suggestion of motion about them. Then he attempted to lift his arms. Nothing happened. He tried again. He heard the command come down from his brain, clearly, urgently, and in his own voice, but it had no effect; his authority disappeared into cold meat and bone. His arms and legs stayed exactly where they were. He couldn’t feel a single damn thing. He wasn’t even getting the cold shakes from smack withdrawal. It was as if his being had become completely disconnected from his body and was now imprisoned in it; only death would release it.
The drums began – one beat, three seconds apart – a deep echoey sound like that of a heavy load hitting the bottom of a long deep dry well. At the beginning they hadn’t had any accompaniment, then they’d once used tapes of authentic voodoo drummers recorded in the Haitian mountains, and now Solomon had flown them over and set them up in Miami. When they weren’t playing the ceremonies they worked the club circuit from New York to New Orleans.
At the twelfth beat the Barons linked hands with a flutter and slap of leather on leather. Then the light behind The Catman went out. For a moment they stood linked together in complete darkness. Carmine could feel the nervous pulse of the guy to his left; he heard him swallow and breathe a little harder through his nose. It was probably his first time here.
When the drum was struck for the thirteenth a dark but powerful purple light gradually came on, bathing the circle in its rich, almost liquid glow.
At the fifteenth drum beat the Barons began to move, slowly, anti-clockwise, one step at a time, one step per drum beat.
Christ! Jean thought. He’s coming.
The giant figures were moving around him, turning slowly but deliberately like the mechanism of some ghastly machine; a complex lock gradually opening, unlocking horror.
He was scared now, real scared; scarder than he’d ever been – absolutely and utterly terrified.
He knew what was about to happen, those things he hadn’t believed before - the slicing of the neck, drinking off the blood while you were still alive, draining your life out of you before your very eyes. Then they’d take his soul.
The drum was beating faster. He could feel it in his stomach, stirring the contents, making them jump, making them come to life. He suddenly felt like he’d swallowed a sack of live toads, and they were hopping around inside of him, jumping at his stomach, trying to get out. It was hurting him real bad, not nausea pain, but pain like he’d been punched by a cast iron fist.
The drum got faster. Another had joined in, slipped in behind it, a snare, building up a rhythm. The Barons were moving in time, picking up speed. They were starting to blur, the whites into blacks, losing their shape. He tried to focus on one and follow him, but he couldn’t move his head. He tried closing his eyes but he couldn’t do that either. He tried looking away but even that wasn’t an option.
Jean knew he couldn’t win. He knew it was over, that he was finished.
The Barons were now spinning so fast they’d become an indistinct grey mass, but the purple light they were bathed in was hitting their waistcoat chains and belt buckles, and these were spitting out weird bright red, blue, green, yellow and orange reflections in the shape of deadly bats.
He was getting dozy. He felt part of himself fading away, slipping under, not even bothering to put up a struggle.
His stomach was killing. He felt like he’d swallowed a live hungry rodent, scratching and clawing and biting him for all it was worth.
The lights were dazzling him now, burning his eyes like pepper spray. He felt tears running out of them.
Then he heard them chanting as they span around him:
SSSSO-LO-MON
SSSSO-LO-MON
SSSSO-LO-MON
There were more drums now, a whole battery of them, pounding, hurting his head, killing his stomach.
The chant had been picked up by others he couldn’t see, getting louder.
SSSSO-LO-MON
SSSSO-LO-MON
The Barons were now spinning so fast about him the colours had leached out into a thick dirty white cloud, while the reflections had blended into one another forming a thick crimson band around the middle of the circle.
The chant was growing ever louder and the pain in his stomach was intensifying, like he had a boxer in there, flailing away at a punchbag. He wanted to cry out but he couldn’t move his mouth.
And then Solomon appeared. He rose up slowly from out of the ground, a swirling red and orange light shining beneath him, like flames. He was dressed as the Barons were, except all in white, right down to the make-up on his face.
Solomon crossed his arms across his abdomen and drew two long swords from under his coat. The blades caught the light and threw it into Jean’s eyes, sharp and white and hot.
Solomon began whirling and twirling the blades through the air, slicing through the purple darkness…